Hotel Marketing Update - Quarter 4 2016

The biggest change in the hotel marketing industry happened last decade. It was when the OTAs went from a bunch of guys in basements and garages to becoming the dominant force in hotel bookings. Skift did a great history piece on that (which is linked in the benchmark below).

But things are going to be changing. The next decade will possibly be as big a shift as the last one. With virtual reality, artificial intelligence assistants and chatbots the way we book is about to get a pretty big makeover. That's not just true for hotel marketing, it is going to change travel marketing and sales quite fundamentally.

In this benchmark we've looked around to see what is happening, what are the upcoming trends and the (currently considered) crazy ideas and as usual we've added our opinions of what we think.